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When my son was maybe six years old, he learned an important life lesson: when you start an apology with the words, “I’m not really sorry,” it doesn’t count as an apology. Unfortunately, in his almost 63 years, Bill O’Reilly has yet to grasp that valuable rule.

In late March, when the U.S. Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, O’Reilly had ACS President Caroline Fredrickson on his show to “discuss” the issue. Much of the so-called discussion consisted of O’Reilly condescendingly lecturing Fredrickson with faulty analysis, but she was able to calmly explain how the taxing power could very well support the law’s constitutionality.

O’Reilly staked his ground (and reputation) quite clearly when he said, “Ms. Fredrickson, you are going to lose and your arguments are specious … and it's going to be 5 to 4. And if I'm wrong, I will come on, and I will play your clip, and I will apologize for being an idiot.”

When he returned to his show from vacation four days after the high court’s ruling, O’Reilly addressed the issue, which mainstream and social media representatives had been highlighting for days.

“But I am a man of my word,” O’Reilly continued, showing no apparent recognition of the irony. “So I apologize for not factoring in the John Roberts situation. Truthfully, I never in a million years would thought the chief justice would go beyond the scope of the commerce clause to date and into taxation. I may be an idiot for not considering that.”

Someday soon, perhaps not soon enough, the fear mongering over the landmark health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, will be relegated to the dustbins of history.

The scare tactics we’ve lived with for what feels like a decade – the ACA’s minimum coverage provision, requiring Americans who can afford to do so to start paying for a minimum amount of health care coverage in 2014 is an unprecedented expansion of congressional power and a dire threat to liberty as we know it – are getting even louder as oral argument in the case approaches.

The usual suspects, Fox News and rightwing radio host Rush Limbaugh have been the ringleaders of sloppy reasoning and fear mongering, as Media Matters’ David Lyle notes in cogent fashion.

Lyle’s piece documents the shrill arguments – you’ve heard them – if Congress can force us to purchase a minimum amount of health care coverage, then surely it'll pass laws soon to force us to purchase gym memberships, organic foods, and American automobiles.

But Lyle notes this “slippery slope argument turns out, however, to be too slippery by half, and it gets both the Constitution and the facts of the health care marketplace wrong.”

On a Feb. broadcast, Limbaugh suggested once people are required to purchase a minimum amount of health care coverage, then what can stop the government from “making us buy a stupid electric car.” Lyle cites a slew of other examples peddling the slippery slope scare tactic.

But Lyle notes, what others have before “legal and health policy experts have explained, contrary to the right-wing’s ‘broccoli mandate’ talking point, the Affordable Care Act appropriately addresses failures in the health insurance market using the broad powers the Constitution gives Congress to regulate the national economy, and does not lead to the absurd results opponents have imagined.”

As is being widely noted by media, right-wing pundits, or blowhards, such as Fox News’ Sean Hannity, are feverishly working to create uproar over President Obama’s association with the late Harvard Law School Professor Derrick Bell.

TPM’s Ryan J. Reilly reports on Hannity’s airing of a video edited by associates of the late Andrew Breitbart that shows a young Barack Obama, then a Harvard law student, hugging Bell at an event calling for the law school to hire more African American women for its tenured faculty. “This was supposedly secret video that the late Andrew Breitbart had promised from Obama’s college days, showing … Obama supporting Harvard Law Professor Derrick Bell’s campaign for more diversity at the institution,’ Reilly writes.

The video, as TPM and Media Matters’ Simon Maloy note, has been aired and written about before. But, Breitbart’s team hasn’t given up on trying to sully Bell’s legacy.

As Maloy writes, Breitbart, who died last week, has painted Bell as “a dangerous radical who, in the act of pressing his body to the young Obama’s, imparted to him all the insane radicalism that now animates the moderate liberal currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

Obama, and many others for that matter, should be proud of Bell (pictured) and his work.

As noted by Inimai Chettiar, a civil rights attorney, for ACSblog, Bell “was a racial justice pioneer and teacher who enlightened many.” She continued, “He was the first black law professor at Harvard Law School, yet in 1990 he vowed to take an unpaid leave of absence until the school hired a black woman for its tenured faculty.”

As cogently noted in this blog post by David Lyle of Media Matters For America, right-wing pundits and bloggers are going ballistic, especially over Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments to an Egypt interviewer that there are other governing documents, such as South Africa’s constitution that she might consult if she were to draft a constitution “in the year 2012.”

Her comment sent the right-wing blogosphere and activists into frenzy, to say the least.

Religious Right activist Mat Staver, head of the Liberty Counsel and founder of the late Jerry Falwell’s law school, fired off a press statement calling Ginsburg’s comments “unacceptable.” He said she spoke “derisively” of the nation’s founding document, and that she has undermined the “Supreme Court as an institution dedicated to the rule of law, as well as our founding document.”

This is typical for Staver, who is given to over-the-top rhetoric. But it’s also ridiculous. Ginsburg did not knock or degrade the U.S. Constitution in anyway, she merely pointed out the fact that there are newer governing documents that are also worthy of emulation.

Storm clouds appear to be gathering over two of President Obama's judicial nominees facing what Professor Carl Tobias calls an increasingly tight "bottle neck in the Senate." Apparently added to the hit-list for those obstructing nominations are Judge David Hamilton, nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Magistrate Judge Edward Chen, nominated to the U.S. District Court for Northern California.

Both Judges Hamilton and Chen are rated as "well qualified" by the non-partisan American Bar Association (ABA), which rates nominations to the federal bench. "Well qualified" is the highest rating provided by the ABA.

As to Judge Hamilton, Senator Jeff Sessions disagrees with the ABA, having written a letter urging his colleagues to filibuster Hamilton's nomination. Sessions writes that Hamilton's nomination presents "one of the extraordinary circumstances where the President should be informed that his nominee is not qualified."

Sessions, a failed nominee to the federal bench himself, is currently the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Despite his central role in judicial nominations, filibustering Judge Hamilton's advancement to the Seventh Circuit may prove particularly challenging in light of the support for Hamilton's nomination from his home-state Senator Richard Lugar. That said, Lugar's support has yet to prove dispositive for another of Obama's legal nominees -- Indianan Dawn Johnsen, whose nomination to head the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has languished for almost eight months.

One of the charges being repeatedly lobbed at Hamilton's nomination is that he "ruled that praying to Allah does not violate the Establishment of Religion clause in the First Amendment, but praying in Jesus Christ's name does." This allegation was assessed by one observer last April who wrote, "it's all a lie, but ... I was surprised how despicably rancid a lie it it." The opinion at issue is in Hinrichs v Bosma, and is available here.